Banks, not just startups, take part in the re-invention of the financial industry, said LeumiTech’s Yifat Oron

The world’s web companies will inevitably go into Finance, said Yifat Oron, CEO of LeumiTech. Ms. Oron spoke on Tuesday at the FinTech 2018 conference held in Tel Aviv by Calcalist, Bank Leumi, and KPMG.

Ms. Oron spoke at a panel on fintech innovation participated by Arnon Dinur, a partner at Israeli venture capital firm North83, Eitan Bek, a partner at TLV Ventures, and Tomer Michaeli, general partner at Viola FinTech.

Yifat Oron, CEO of LeumiTech. Photo: Orel Cohen

“There’s a great deal of innovation coming not just from fintech companies, but from the banks,” Ms. Oron said. “Some of the players are naturally more conservative, but innovation comes from within and we must fight to protect ourselves,” Ms. Oron said.

“Three years ago we thought that for every service banks offer there will be dozens of tech companies competing, but today we are seeing the world is not heading in that direction,” Ms. Oron said.

“There a lot of room for improvement, and one of the fields that have seen improvement is payments,” Mr. Michaeli said, adding that the innovations and improvements that are part of the fintech ecosystem today were based on the “blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of money that was lost.”